Oracle Blog

Thursday Feb 21, 2013

Dads like me are familiar with a phenomenon known as Silent Dollar Disappearance. This tends to occur when there is a confluence of money in your wallet and teenage children in your home. You never actually see it happen, but if you are paying attention, you might detect that it has happened. As when, for instance, you try to pay for beer and brats at the grocer. It becomes difficult to know for sure whether it was the teenagers. What if you already spent the money on something else? That's what my teenage daughters always said. Or perhaps you had a wallet malfunction, and it flew out. So difficult to pin-point the actual cause.

Linux, like any OS, is vulnerable to a similar phenomenon. It's called silent data corruption. It can be caused by faulty components, such as memory modules or storage systems. It can also be caused by -God forbid- administrative error. As with Silent Dollar Disappearance, it's difficult to detect when data corruption is actually happening. Or what the exact cause was. But, as with Dads and teenagers, you eventually figure out that it has happened.

It may be impossible to identify the culprit after the data has been corrupted, but it's not impossible to stop the culprit ahead of time. Oracle partnered with EMC and Emulex to do just that. And they were kind enough to explain how the did it and how you can benefit. In this article:

"Data integrity protection is not new. ECC and CRC are available on most, if not all, servers, storage arrays, and Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs). But these checks protect the data only temporarily within a single component. They do not ensure that the data you intended to write does not become corrupt as it travels down the data path from the application running in the server to the HBA, the switch, the storage array, and then the physical disk drive. When data corruption occurs, most applications are unaware that the data that was stored on the disk is not the data that was intended to be stored.

"Over the last several years, EMC, Emulex, and Oracle have worked together to drive and implement the Protection Information additions to the T10 SBC standard, which enables the validation of data as it moves through the data path to ensure that silent data corruption does not occur."